HELL OF A RIDE

By RICHARD CORLISS

The typical adventure movie is a big, gaudy lie. It says life is a battle of one man, armed with only wit and grit, against a hostile universe. This romantic, existential notion does a disservice to the way most people live and work. We aren't solo flyers or secret agents. We are a squadron of team players dependent on our colleagues and increasingly on our machines to get us through our jobs. Often, because of those machines or those colleagues--or ourselves--we fail. And sometimes the bravest thing we can do is react quickly, boldly, gracefully to the failures and compromises we face every day. Getting along, getting by: it's a big subject the movies hardly ever touch.

The 17 Apollo moon missions, from 1967 to 1972, provided cubic tons of melodrama, from the explosion of the Apollo 1 test module that killed three astronauts to Neil Armstrong's buoyant lunar stroll from Apollo 11. The apogee of American know-how and teamwork, the program could, at the flick of a wrong switch, careen from triumph to tragedy. In this job, success meant you forged the ultimate frontier; failure meant you died with the whole world watching.

The Apollo 13 mission--launched at 13:13 military time on an April afternoon in 1970--carried the threat of death in its oxygen tanks. They exploded on April 13, imperiling both the mission and the lives of astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert. Commander Lovell, history's greatest traveler with almost 7 million miles on his Gemini and Apollo odometers, had dreamed of walking on the moon. Now he and his companions would be lucky to walk again on the earth. In an anxious four days, they would learn how to pilot a wounded, runaway craft; they would assemble an air purifier using homely artifacts found in any space module; and they would hope against hope that the guys back in Houston knew how to improvise against chaos.

Apollo 13, based on Lovell's memoir of the mission, chronicles those hairy days and salutes the men who worked to keep a disappointment from becoming a catastrophe. Ron Howard's film pays tribute to the signal and endangered American virtues of individual ingenuity and team spirit. "It gives credit where a great amount of credit has been forgotten," says Tom Hanks, the exemplary Hollywood star and former astro-nut teen who realized a dream of his own by playing Lovell. "Launching men into space is a fantastic undertaking, which very few people today seem to appreciate. It's ironic that we made a movie about a mission that was a 'failure,' because it's probably the best celebration of what NASA did."

A throwback to classic Hollywood pictures about men in groups--notably Howard Hawks' gruff flyboy panegyrics Dawn Patrol, Only Angels Have Wings and Air Force--the new film is also a splendid display of old-fashioned realistic special effects, which convince viewers not that they are in a cartoon but that they are inside a real rocket with real people who really might die. The result is that rare Hollywood achievement, an adventure of the intelligent spirit. From lift-off to splashdown, Apollo 13 gives one hell of a ride.

In Cocoon, Gung Ho, Parenthood, Backdraft and The Paper, Howard splashed his vision on a huge canvas and peopled it with a sprawling cast. His problem was that in pushing a zillion buttons on the plot console, he often pushed too hard. Perhaps fearful of losing his audience, Howard would let his films get shrill or dewy. In Apollo 13, though, he has only a few dips into bathos (a too-cute child's face here, a dotty grandma there). Mostly, he makes viewers partners, trusting them to keep track of all the techno-talk, to take on faith what they don't immediately grasp.

Led by Ed Harris as flight director Gene Kranz and Gary Sinise as Ken Mattingly, who was scrubbed from the mission two days before launch, the grunts of Mission Control are efficient and almost faceless, a Greek chorus busily computing solutions. The astronauts' wives, notably Marilyn Lovell (lustrous Kathleen Quinlan), cope sensibly with despair. Lovell's partners in jeopardy (Bill Paxton as Haise, Kevin Bacon as Swigert) keep things cool, especially when they nearly freeze in their icy cabin. And Hanks provides the anchor. His Lovell--as strong, faithful and emotionally straightforward as Forrest Gump--carries the story like a precious oxygen backpack. His resourcefulness gives Lovell strength; his gift for conveying worry gives the film its humanity and a purchase on ordinary-Joe heroism.

In '60s newspapers and magazines, the Apollo astronauts were portrayed as heroes in the old mold: God-fearin', jut-jawed, steely-eyed missilemen, gazing into the skies they would soon conquer. These brainy jocks with their laconic C.B. chatter and their diplomas from M.I.T., Princeton, Caltech and Harvard were icons of stability in a most fractious decade. Americans looked across the Pacific and saw defeat. They looked at their campuses and saw revolt; at their inner cities and saw flames. For inspiration there was nowhere to look but up.

But what was there to see inside the techie Trekkies of Apollo? They seemed defiantly bland: all sinew, not much soul. They were the country-club Republican answer to '60s radicals. Instead of growing beards and dropping out, they kept their haircuts short and their rebellion in check. The most privileged among them played golf on the moon.

Which helps explain why, by Apollo 13--just the third moonwalk flight, nine months after the Eagle had landed--Americans were already sated with their star-cruising stars. Jim Lovell's little TV show on the third night of the mission, intended for the whole country's viewing pleasure, was not carried by the networks; it was a rerun of a rerun. Fly me to the moon? Yawn--no thanks. A vicarious lunar trip was now no more exciting than a seaside vacation with the kids.

All right, then. Imagine a minivan towing a small boat to the beach. The minivan is Odyssey, Apollo 13's command module (named after the Stanley Kubrick film about a man lost and transformed in space); the boat is Aquarius, the lunar module (after the song from Hair, Broadway's hymn to hippie insurrection). Now imagine that, on a nowhere stretch of road, your van just about blows up. How do you get home?

In essence, that was Apollo 13's problem. After the explosion, Aquarius became a lifeboat; in it the astronauts would try sailing home on the gravitational breezes of the moon and the earth. To steer their vessel, they would refute the argument that astronauts were not so much pilots as passengers or cargo--they had to navigate using the sun and the earth as a compass. And with doom dogging their flight, newsfolk and viewers finally paid attention. Imminent death is great for ratings.

Today it may be the recipe for hero making in the new conservative style. Here, after all, was a team that actually fulfilled its contract with America. The Apollo gang got a man on the moon in one urgent decade. Then they worked even more impressively to bring three men back safely from the beyond. William Broyles Jr., the former editor of Texas Monthly and Newsweek, and creator of the TV series China Beach, who wrote Apollo 13's script with Al Reinert, spells out the family values: "In these cynical times, when exploitation of violence in movies is the norm, it was great to make a movie about real, ordinary people who do extraordinary things."

As any producer or key grip can attest, the making of a big movie can seem more complex and fraught with peril than any missile launch. The miracle of Apollo 13 is that for a relatively spare $52 million, Howard and his team got it right. They knew what they wanted--and what they didn't. They were not aiming for the wild mix of comedy and rapture in the ultimate astronaut movie, The Right Stuff (1983); that, says Harris, "was about the space program as a p.r. phenomenon, whereas Apollo 13 is about men fulfilling a duty." They didn't want a stratospheric disaster movie like the whiny Marooned, a 1969 annoyance about a fatal mission and a dead commander (named Jim!), or a paranoid thriller like 1978's zippy Capricorn One. The astronauts had felt burned by some of the space soap operas. "Listen," Lovell told Howard, "just tell our story as it happened, and you'll have a thrilling movie."

Howard's goal was meticulous realism, in everything from the arc of emotion to the gizmos on the module dashboards. "There must be more than 400 controls, switches, circuit breakers, buttons and lights in the spacecraft," says Dave Scott, the film's technical adviser, who as commander of Apollo 15 was the seventh man to walk on the moon. "I spent about three months looking at them all and found just one little, insignificant thing wrong: the color of a small scribe on a window."

"It was like cramming for an exam," says Harris of the film's preproduction. Hanks calls himself "the most annoying person around" as a stickler for following procedure. He pored over the air-to-ground transcripts of the Apollo 13 flight to make sure he got the nomenclature down solid. "Most people," he says, "think a spacecraft moves like the Millennium Falcon as it zooms by the Death Star at light speed to defeat Darth Vader. We did this film in the real physical universe. It not only gave us more credence as filmmakers and actors, but it should help the movie become more involving for audiences." The hyper-real special effects were provided by James Cameron's Digital Domain unit, with Cameron (director of The Terminator and True Lies) serving as an uncredited consultant. Remarkably, not one frame of film was lifted from documentaries or NASA footage. All effects were created from scratch.

To achieve the effect of weightlessness in the space capsule, the Apollo team used NASA's KC-135, a converted Boeing 707 jet with an open cargo bay that climbs 30,000 ft. and then arcs into a dive, creating a 23-sec. period of weightlessness. The crew shot about four hours of weightlessness footage, which required more than 500 topsy-turvy takes--97 in one day. Says Lovell: "The actors playing astronauts actually spent more time in the zero-gravity plane than any real astronaut ever did."

The weightlessness took a while to master. "There were times when we'd finish shooting a scene, and I had no idea which way I was going to fall," says Hanks. But he soon learned to love defying gravity. "It's not a sensation you can liken to anything else," he says dreamily. "It's not floating like Superman but kind of floating like an angel."

Apollo 13 has a trace of this mooniness, the mystical nostalgia that seized most of the astronauts who got there and back. This cosmic optimism, the movie suggests, is one of the reasons for spending billions of dollars on the Apollo program: something wonderful is out there.

And something silly. When Howard toured NASA, he learned that the visitors' favorite question was: How do you pee in space? "Well," he decided, "that means we'll have to show it in the movie." So they do. Adds Hanks: "Maybe in the sequel we'll show how they go doo-doo."

Spoken like a steely-eyed missileman.

--Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles